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Whole-worker organizing begins with the recognition that real people do not live two separate lives, one beginning when they arrive at work and punch the clock and another when they punch out at the end of their shift. The pressing concerns that bear down on them every day are not divided into two neat piles, only one of which is of concern to unions. At the end of each shift workers go home, through streets that are sometimes violent, past their kids’ crumbling schools, to their often substandard housing, where the tap water is likely unsafe.
Whole-worker organizing seeks to engage “whole workers” in the betterment of their lives. To keep them consistently acting in their self interest, while constantly expanding their vision of who that self interest includes, from their immediate peers in their unit, to their shift, their workplace, their street, their kids’ school, their community, their watershed, their nation and their world.
Many of the newly trained organizers were not committed to deep organizing. They were ordered to take shortcuts of all kinds, because organizing is too slow—a refrain they heard often from Tom Woodruff, the organizing czar at SEIU and, later, Change to Win. Often a national union would send a team of talented and trained young organizers to help a group of workers win the vote to form a union, then put them on planes to another election the next day. Meanwhile, the new union members, full of raised expectations about the changes their hard-won union would bring to their lives, would show up at their first meeting and ask, “Wow, where did everyone go?” This practice of “air dropping” organizers in for intense, time-limited campaigns is the very opposite of deep organizing.
An example might help illustrate the point. In a workplace organizing campaign, often the first workers an organizer meets are those who might be termed the “loudmouths.” They talk back to the boss—but they talk back to everyone else as well. Inexperienced organizers often mistakenly identify them as natural leaders, when in fact their coworkers rarely pay serious attention to anything they say. More experienced organizers know this, and also know that identifying the real leaders takes more time and a more subtle understanding of workplace dynamics. But when they’re organizing support in the community, they’ll go straight to the “loudmouth” priest who talks a radical line, without noticing that no one in town outside his tiny congregation pays any attention to what he says, and meanwhile they’ll overlook quieter clergy whose large congregations include many of the workers in the organizing campaign.
As time went on we learned just how nervous workers were about meeting with their religious leaders to ask them for support. They might stand up to their boss at work by putting on a union button, which union organizers invariably think is the scariest thing a worker can do, yet they struggle to muster the courage to ask their minister for a meeting. Note to labor: Workers relate more to their faith than to their job, and fear God more than they fear the boss.
Giving themselves strength in numbers was the key. If they went as a group to meet their minister, their request for help was likely to be successful. The training sessions we were running for these meetings were crucial, and role-playing was the crucial component.
The Desert Springs contract had now expired. This was a big deal. Under US labor law, when a contract expires, four dangerous things happen: workers can strike; the employer can lock workers out; the employer can stop collecting union membership dues from the workers’ paychecks; and the “permanent window” period for decertifying the union begins. In short, everything escalates. Shutting down dues collection is a major escalation and creates an immediate crisis. It rarely happens. Unions have to fight for contracts that stipulate that the employer deduct union dues from the paychecks of the union members and forward the money to the union. This is the money that keeps things running, and a union can find itself suddenly bankrupt if a large employer stops collecting dues. And a strike, well, a strike is another order of magnitude entirely. And a strike in a hospital, well, that had never happened in the history of Las Vegas.
So when UHS offered a contract extension at Desert Springs, there were compelling reasons to accept. The bargaining, however, was going nowhere. We had lots of workers at negotiations, and they had made detailed proposals. These proposals certainly were not going to make UHS happy, but they were worthy of serious consideration: We had shown that they would improve patient care and that the hospital could afford them. And still, UHS wouldn’t budge. In union-busting literature this is called “creating futility.” On the other hand, we were at 70 percent membership at Desert Springs and 65 percent at Valley, we were building a tight organization, and all the excitement and buzz was in our favor. We rejected the contract extension. It was time to put the workers’ new power into play.
One thing that struck me over and over in Vegas and almost everywhere else I worked for unions: workers want to make things better so badly that they are willing again and again to set aside frustration and anger stemming from past bad experiences with unions if you offer them a plan to win that makes them the central participants. The ability to bring workers to this sort of expectation is what separates the best organizers from merely good. It isn’t easy. The key is that laser-like focus on identifying and developing leaders. Jamie had developed into a solid organizer, and she and the leaders built a hell of a union at the Health District.
For their next series of forced two-hour meetings, the Yessin team produced a scary video about SEIU Nevada. We dispatched organizers to buy hundreds of microwave popcorn packets and distribute them to all the workers as fast as they could. The break rooms at the hospital were all equipped with microwaves, and for the entire week workers walked into the screenings ready for the horror flick with popcorn in hand. In organizer shoptalk this is called cutting the tension.
By the end of April the average worker in that hospital had been through ten hours of mandatory captive audience meetings. Then management replaced the meetings with mandatory one-on-ones, working every intimidation angle they could. Evidently it had dawned on them that when you put workers who are organized and united together in the same room, even as a captive audience, the result is not exactly union-busting. Maybe their message would be more convincing in an isolation cell, er, a private office.
lol
Arnold walked in and got right down to the business of doing our work for us. He chomped on gum with his mouth wide open. The workers made bets about how many pieces he had in his mouth at once—at least enough to make him nearly unintelligible. Health-care workers tend not to like behavior that needlessly promotes the spread of germs, and no one in the room could understand what he was saying. If we asked for clarification, he would look up, say, “I said it already,” and just proceed. I responded each time by interrupting him mid-sentence and exercising my right to call a private caucus, informing him that when he was ready to stop yelling at the workers he could knock on the door and we might let him back in. With every break, Arnold’s behavior got increasingly out of control; meanwhile our caucuses became more lighthearted. The nurses loved it; they were on a high. Hey, you could actually do this. In fact, it was fun.
When you have a union, you don’t have to take bullshit from the boss. You can just send him to his room and tell him he can come out when he’s ready to behave. The negotiations wrapped up early that day; it was obvious they were going nowhere.
“An offer to return to work has been brokered with the governor, the speaker, the chair of the County Commission, the mayor …”
I didn’t even get to the details before everyone began screaming and clapping. I called for silence and insisted they let me explain the rest, because we needed to call the political leaders right away—they were holding the bosses hostage. Someone made a motion and it was all over. Then D Taylor whispered to me that he wanted to speak. I introduced him with a great deal of affection and acknowledged the crucial role he had been playing. The workers gave him a standing ovation.
“I have run a lot of strikes in Nevada over the past twenty years. A few of them went on for more than one year, one of them lasted seven years, and, never, ever did the governor of the state even call me, let alone broker a settlement. You are nurses, and I hope you understand now that when you choose to exercise it, you have a lot of power.”
The house came down.
teared up reading this lol
The same holds true for quality of patient care. The best patient outcomes require a seamless health-care team, and the best way to get there is to have all the workers in one organization where they can sit side by side and bargain for new and better work systems as well as fair pay. Here is a concrete example that goes straight to the heart of the difference between the CNA approach and what we were doing in Nevada. In 2004, California became the only state in the nation to implement legally guaranteed minimum nurse-to-patient ratios.¶ That victory is one of the CNA’s main claims to fame. And they deserve plenty of credit—it took a huge political fight to win, which the CNA is capable of waging. And, it’s an incredibly important law. Years later, they successfully defended the ratios when Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger made a concerted attempt to roll the law back. In 2006, our local also won minimum nurse-to-patient ratios in our contract with the CHW hospitals in Las Vegas—it had been one of our top demands. But in our CHW contracts, we also won language prohibiting management, as they implemented our new nurse-to-patient ratios, from cutting non-nurse positions. This difference is crucial. Because the CNA was only fighting for the elite workers, the intent of the California law, when it took effect, was grossly undermined by hospital bosses, who gutted their ancillary staffs to pay for the additional nurses they were required to hire. Nurses in California now have many additional tasks that were formerly performed by aids, housekeepers, techs, phlebotomists, and others. In Nevada, when the CHW hospitals began to implement the new nurse-patient ratios stipulated in our contracts, they had to keep all existing positions on the ancillary staff.
ahhh. a good argument for industrial over craft unionism